Jorito

Isn't the whole point of this album to pick (main) character themes rather than area themes? Or am I misunderstanding?

I'm probably game for this but might take a while to get a claim in - gotta clear the backlog a bit first and find myself a nice protagonist.

Chipping in, what DFW is saying is true. It's a lot of work managing an album, but I've personally found it very rewarding and satisfactory (hence doing my 3rd album gig, as the Terranigma co-director this time). There's something about working with artists, see and help their vision come to life bit by bit and unleashing the combined tracks unto the world that has a certain something to it. It can feel like cat herding at times, but for me it has been worth it. Having a manageable album vision and scope and clear deadlines (I prefer albums projects that can be finished within 1 year) definitely helps. Either way, it is typically a process that takes months at least (sometimes years, with large gaps of inactivity if you're unlucky), depending on the vision, scope, directing and that does involve a commitment of time and energy from the director(s). I've seen projects stall because the director(s) started enthusiastically but couldn't keep the time and energy committed to it to see things through to the end. Maybe directing your own album is not something you want to do, but if it is something you're considering, I hope it helps to give you a sense of the things you might run into rather than going in blind.

I can definitely help out with the last bit, just hit me up in a PM. I also know some flute players and can probably help connect you once the arrangement is further along.

I'm not an instrumentalist or performer, but I do have some connections... what did you have in mind? Maybe I can help find collaborators!

The latter; we’re just trying to help make the tracks as good as they can be, to make the release cycle smoother and to prevent delays in post production. Look at it a bit like how the workshop moderators are working here; they will evaluate the tracks that are labeled ‘finished’ and will pass back the feedback to you with a ‘yeah, this would probably pass album evaluation in the final production stages’ or a ‘hmm, you probably should have another look at X before submitting’. Also pointing out that any OCR-A (official OCR) album has to pass through an album evaluation by OCR staff. Not all tracks need to pass to be on the album, but there is a threshold that has to be met before OCR can accept and post the album. This is regardless of this mock panel we’re introducing, that’s mostly here to give you feedback earlier and to maximize your track getting a ‘yay’ during album eval. Hope I explained it well, but don’t hesitate to ask for clarifications if I didn’t.

Wow, that was a long and thoughtful read, Rama. Interesting, though, and cool that you highlight the community aspect and the people in it, rather than the creative output. Sometimes we tend to forget it's not always just about the output

You probably should! We'd love to have you on board

Maybe it loads quickly on Windows, but on Mac it’s a bit of a tired old dog. It loads slowly, and the GUI also slows down on bigger tracks. These are all known issues, and the devs are working on improvements here, but wrt. performance Logic beats it without even trying. Of course Logic has been incredibly optimized for MacOS, where Bitwig’s focus has been on other aspects, and it only affects you if you run on Mac, but I thought I’d point it out. There is a lot of other stuff to like about it though!

Good to see some activity here again! I did dust off my arrangement of Crysta and was able to recruit some help for it... I think it's gonna be pretty cool Two-weekly WIP updates might be a bit much for a hobby project, IMO. Life has a tendency to get in the way and leave you unable to work on music, in my experience. Frequent check-ins/status updates (maybe just monthly in stead of bi-weekly) rather than WIP updates might be an alternative to consider for such cases. For Resonance of the Pure Land that worked quite well, as a means of keeping each other updated and to prevent radio silence and ultimately dropped tracks, but ymmv. Just sharing some ideas here! Looking forward to get this going again!

Ah yeah, I've heard about FL Studio and modwheels. Not sure what's up with that, since I don't use it myself, but it seems more people struggle with it. Not sure how long that Bitwig demo is valid (Bitwig is normally $129 with a year of free updates), but Bitwig definitely works well together with controllers with modwheel. Another option you could try is Cakewalk, which is free since BandLab took it over. I used it way back and rather liked it, and you can't beat the price of free: https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk. My own setup isn't that special tbh, just an iMac, a Deepmind 12 synth that I merely use as a controller and a fairly sizeable collection of plugins and sample libs. Thanks for your comments about the recent releases btw, didn't quite expect it in a thread like this, but I'll take it

I have Bitwig and did a few tracks in it (posted remixes, even). It is pretty cool, a bit of a mixture of Live, Logic and Cubase, looks like. With the upcoming Bitwig 3 you even get a modular synth build thingie inside of it. Best ask @Sir_NutS about it, the resident Bitwig advocate I never worked with Reaper, but my impressions is that it’s a very flexible, more traditional DAW that you can (... must?) customize to your hearts content to make it work for you. YMMV. Ultimately it all depends on what you want and what you’re using now. A different DAW can inspire you to do different creative things. Or it can annoy and confuse you to no end, My go-to DAW is Logic Pro, but sometimes I do a Bitwig track just to try different things. But that only works if that other DAW is different enough from your regular one. So... why are you considering to switch/start using another DAW?

Yay! Finally gonna wrap up Crysta, let me bug some people for the 2 performances I still need and wrap it up

I was in talks with Odai to pick this up, but then got caught up in real life. Hope things get a bit more stable on my end soon...

Nailed the psytrance vibe for sure! Great stuff, love it. Teach me how